Two Little Dickheads: THE TIME FOR FUN IS MEOW is sketch comedy in its loosest form. Sharnema Nougar and David Tieck string together a series of surreal ‘bits,’ jingles, and jumping around in weird costumes for forty-five minutes of absurdity.
Granted, my friend and I missed the first minute as our previous show ran over, and I cannot help but feel we missed some kind of explanation in those sixty seconds which made sense of the rest of the show.
Rather than cohesive sketches, each bit was more of a themed riff. Like if you and your best friend wrote down your most ridiculous wine-drunk conversations and then tried to re-create them for an audience who wasn’t there when they were funny originally.
The advertising promises “catchy original songs,” but I would have described them more as jingles, such as their ‘Shower Time’ theme tune. That was entertaining the first time they did it, acting out a shower scene in different genres, starting with horror. Perhaps I should have known from the show’s title that the punchline would not have been more than them grabbing each other’s genitals while pretending to be blinded by soap, but I found the repetition of that one joke boring and unpalatable.
It’s not an original but they did perform Rihanna’s ‘Shine Bright Like a Diamond’ which allowed Sharnema to show off her genuinely impressive singing voice. She is a clearly talented singer, but the section was no more than displaying their sparkly ‘diamond’ costumes while singing the entire song, which can hardly be described as a sketch in my opinion.
It was difficult to get a grasp on Sharnema and Dave’s characters, if indeed they were playing any, as they seemed at first to be awkward friends, then a goofball couple, then a cliché heterosexual couple who secretly hate each other, then best friends. Their individual personalities had no consistency either, despite clearly not being a series of different characters, meaning there was no sense of flow to the show. They mentioned that THE TIME FOR FUN IS MEOW is a “greatest hits” compilation of previous bits which might explain it. Perhaps these sketches made more sense in the context of their original shows, when a theme carried through.
Dave and Sharnema were not striving to be heartfelt and genuine by any means, but the funniest parts of the show were their jokes when things went wrong. Their previous shows have been advertised as more improv-heavy so perhaps this is where the Two Little Dickheads shine the most, and they were not given the chance in tonight’s scripted show. When it became clear that the condoms they were blowing up were not intended to explode in their faces it was a lost opportunity for some improvised comedy that instead fell flat as they hurriedly moved on.
The most palatable part of the show was the ‘communication song’ where they revealed they are a real-life couple and showed us how they stay so happy together, through singing about their feelings. It was the only part of the show recognisable as a cohesive sketch, with both playing a quirky yet endearing character in their dysfunctional musical communication.
If you like cringe comedy and absurdist humour more than I do perhaps you will find the magic in THE TIME FOR FUN IS MEOW that I missed. One thing I am thankful to the Two Little Dickheads for is getting me to make the most of leaving the house and therefore booking to see the comedian Dane Simpson, who was excellent, and did not leave me wondering if I had missed the joke.
Two Little Dickheads: THE TIME FOR FUN IS MEOW is on at Fringe World from Feb 6-12.